I have written seven books in four years. One of them has been read by strangers.
The other six are files. Sharma, a memoir. Dharamshala Wedding, realistic fiction. Venom of Vengeance, one, two and three, fantasy. The Fish Can Talk, short stories. Two people have read them. My editor, and my wife.
That is the whole readership of four years of work.
What finished actually means
People assume unpublished manuscripts sit in a drawer gathering dust and regret. Mine are in active maintenance.
The third Venom of Vengeance book is in developmental editing, phase two. That is a real process with a real editor and a real invoice, on a book that has no publisher and no release date. The other five are done and waiting, either to be picked up by somebody or to be self-published by me.
Neither of those is a plan yet. They are two doors and I have not walked through either.
The Fish Can Talk comes out on 14 October, so in five weeks that number changes and five books are waiting instead of six. I am aware that solving it one book at a time, five weeks per book, is not a strategy.
I queried somewhere between 150 and 200 agents over four years. I do not have a precise figure because I stopped keeping a clean count somewhere in year two, which tells you something in itself. No agent. Everything that has reached a reader has reached them because I put it there myself.
The one that bothers me
Sharma is the one I mind about most.
It is autofiction, and the material is my own life. It follows a family that is upper caste and poor, and it takes seriously that those two facts sit in the same person at the same time. In the book that person is pushed around by wealthier upper caste people, and pushed around by lower caste people who had money and connections he did not have.
The book does not argue that anyone else’s difficulty was smaller. It argues that his was real, and that the thing which kept predicting what happened to him was money.
I think that is a book worth reading. I also think it is a book that is hard to place, because it does not sit neatly on either side of an argument people already know how to have. That is not a complaint about anybody’s motives. It is a description of what I have observed while trying to place it.
What I have stopped believing
For a long time I assumed the work was the constraint. If a book was good enough it would find its way out. That belief survives contact with reality for about two years.
What I believe now is narrower and more useful. The writing is one job. Getting a book in front of a reader is a second job, with different skills, and being good at the first one does not qualify you for the second. Nobody tells you this because everybody who says it out loud sounds bitter.
I built a book formatting tool this year, partly because the second job kept defeating me and I wanted to remove one of the obstacles for myself. That is what four years of unread manuscripts does. It turns you into someone who solves distribution problems.
What I am doing about it
Nothing dramatic. Three things.
The Fish Can Talk goes out in October, which moves one book from finished to published.
Venom of Vengeance three finishes its edit, and then I make a decision about the trilogy as a trilogy rather than as three separate orphans.
Sharma stays where it is for now. I am not sending it anywhere this year. I would rather hold it than push it out badly while I am learning how to do the second job properly.
The part I have made peace with, mostly
There is a version of this where I tell you the writing was worth it regardless of who read it. I half believe that.
The honest version is that a book with two readers is not finished in the way a book with two thousand readers is finished. Something is missing and I would be lying if I said it did not matter. Writing is a thing you do alone and publishing is a thing that happens between two people, and I have only done the first half, six times.
I am not stopping. Six manuscripts is not evidence that I should stop. It is evidence that I can produce, which is the harder half to learn, and that I have been bad at the easier half, which can be fixed.
If you have finished a book that nobody has read, you are not doing this wrong. You are halfway through it, in the part that nobody photographs.
